Last Traces: The Lost Art of Auschwitz

by Joseph Czarnecki

A poignant legacy of the death camp victims features the paintings, drawings, poems, slogans, and calendars found in out-of-the-way locations at Auschwitz

175 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1989

Reviews

[Ellee · Rating 4 out of 5]

While I disagree with a couple of the author's interpretations, this is a great book. It helps reinforce that there were people there. That Auschwitz was a place full of people. Sometimes the death that shrouds the Holocaust and the large numbers of the dead make it easy to forget that these were/are individuals. People. Not just prisoners, victims, Nazis, etc. The place was populated with people. To me, that's where it all becomes the most terrible. Read the book. Appropriate for most ages & would also be a good tool for parents trying to explain the Holocaust to kids. Includes many stories about the resistance movement there also.

[R.J. Gilmour · Rating 3 out of 5]

Art was not a cultural frivolity to the inmates of Auschwitz; it literally kept their spirits alive. It was self-expression in the
teeth of the annihilation of the self. It was an expresison of the the need to retain psychological coherance in a malevolent ambience whose essential purpose was the destruction of the psyche of its inahabitants. The words 'I am' written on a wall are the epitaph of someone about to die....Picasso said that 'painting is an instrument of war to be waged against brutality and darkness.' xv